WORKING, as I have been for the last couple of years, ona short biography of Jawaharlal Nehru, I became consciousof the extent to which we have taken for granted onevital legacy of his: the creation of an infrastructurefor excellence in science and technology, which hasbecome a source of great self-confidence and competitiveadvantage for the country today. Nehru was alwaysfascinated by science and scientists. He made it a pointto attend the annual Indian Science Congress every year,and he gave free rein (and taxpayers' money) toscientists in whom he had confidence to build high-quality institutions. Men like Homi Bhabha and VikramSarabhai constructed the platform for Indianaccomplishments in the fields of atomic energy and spaceresearch; they and their successors have given thecountry a scientific establishment without peer in thedeveloping world. Jawaharlal's establishment of theIndian Institutes of Technology (and the spur theyprovided to other lesser institutions) have produced manyof the finest minds in America's Silicon Valley. Today,an IIT degree is held in the same reverence in the U.S.as one from MIT or Caltech, and India's extraordinaryleadership in the software industry is the indirectresult of Jawaharlal Nehru's faith in scientificeducation. Nehru left India with the world's second-largest pool of trained scientists and engineers,integrated into the global intellectual system, to adegree without parallel outside the developed West.

And yet the roots of Indian science and technology go fardeeper than Nehru. I was reminded of this yet again by aremarkable new book, Lost Discoveries, by the Americanwriter Dick Teresi. Teresi's book studies the ancientnon-Western foundations of modern science, and while heranges from the Babylonians and Mayans to Egyptians andother Africans, it is his references to India that caughtmy eye. And how astonishing those are! The Rig Vedaasserted that gravitation held the universe together 24centuries before the apple fell on Newton's head. TheVedic civilisation subscribed to the idea of a sphericalearth at a time when everyone else, even the Greeks,assumed the earth was flat. By the Fifth Century A.D.Indians had calculated that the age of the earth was 4.3billion years; as late as the 19th Century, Englishscientists believed the earth was a hundred million yearsold, and it is only in the late 20th Century that Westernscientists have come to estimate the earth to be about4.6 billion years old.

If I were to focus on just one field in this column, itwould be that of mathematics. India invented modernnumerals (known to the world as "Arabic" numerals becausethe West got them from the Arabs, who learned them fromus!). It was an Indian who first conceived of the zero,shunya; the concept of nothingness, shunyata, integral toHindu and Buddhist thinking, simply did not exist in theWest. ("In the history of culture," wrote Tobias Dantzigin 1930, "the invention of zero will always stand out asone of the greatest single achievements of the humanrace.") The concept of infinite sets of rational numberswas understood by Jain thinkers in the Sixth Century BCEOur forefathers can take credit for geometry,trigonometry, and calculus; the "Bakhshali manuscript",70 leaves of bark dating back to the early centuries ofthe Christian era, reveals fractions, simultaneousequations, quadratic equations, geometric progressionsand even calculations of profit and loss, with interest.

Indian mathematicians invented negative numbers: theBritish mathematician Lancelot Hogben, grudginglyacknowledging this, suggested ungraciously that "perhapsbecause the Hindus were in debt more often than not, itoccurred to them that it would also be useful to have anumber which represent the amount of money one owes".(That theory would no doubt also explain why Indians werethe first to understand how to add, multiply and subtractfrom zero -- because zero was all, in Western eyes, weever had.)

The Sulba Sutras, composed between 800 and 500 BCE,demonstrate that India had Pythagoras' theorem before thegreat Greek was born, and a way of getting the squareroot of 2 correct to five decimal places. (Vedic Indianssolved square roots in order to build sacrificial altarsof the proper size.) The Kerala mathematician Nilakanthawrote sophisticated explanations of the irrationality of"pi" before the West had heard of the concept. TheVedanga Jyotisha, written around 500 B.C., declares:"Like the crest of a peacock, like the gem on the head ofa snake, so is mathematics at the head of all knowledge."Our mathematicians were poets too! But one could go backeven earlier, to the Harappan civilisation, for evidenceof a highly sophisticated system of weights and measuresin use around 3000 B.C.

Archaeologists also found a "ruler" made with lines drawnprecisely 6.7 millimeters apart with an astonishing levelof accuracy. The "Indus inch" was a measure in consistentuse throughout the area. The Harappans also inventedkiln-fired bricks, less permeable to rain and floodwaterthan the mud bricks used by other civilisations of thetime. The bricks contained no straw or other bindingmaterial and so turned out to be usable 5, 000 yearslater when a British contractor dug them up to constructa railway line between Multan and Lahore. And while theywere made in 15 different sizes, the Harappan bricks wereamazingly consistent: their length, width and thicknesswere invariably in the ratio of 4:2:1.

"Indian mathematical innovations," writes Teresi, "had aprofound effect on neighbouring cultures." The greatestimpact was on Islamic culture, which borrowed heavilyfrom Indian numerals, trigonometry and analemma. Indiannumbers probably arrived in the Arab world in 773 A.D.with the diplomatic mission sent by the Hindu ruler ofSind to the court of the Caliph al-Mansur. This gave riseto the famous arithmetical text of al-Khwarizmi, writtenaround 820 A.D., which contains a detailed exposition ofIndian mathematics, in particular the usefulness of thezero. With Islamic civilisation's rise and spread,knowledge of Indian mathematics reached as far afield asCentral Asia, North Africa and Spain. "In serving as aconduit for incoming ideas and a catalyst for influencingothers," Teresi adds, "India played a pivotal role." Hisresearch is such a rich lode that I intend to return toancient Indian science in a future column.

Shashi Tharoor is the United Nations Under Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information and theauthor of seven books, most recently Riot and (with M. F.Husain) Kerala: God's Own Country.

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